


Love Is All You Keep

by SouthSideStory



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Identity Porn, M/M, One Shot, Past Torture, Past Violence, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, minor Natasha Romanoff - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-11
Updated: 2017-08-11
Packaged: 2018-12-14 03:38:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11774706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SouthSideStory/pseuds/SouthSideStory
Summary: James hardly knows Steve, but the man he used to be adored him with single-minded ferocity. Worshiped him with the purity of purpose that zealots reserve for their gods. It isn’t really surprising that devotion like this could persevere, adapting through death and rebirth.Maybe this is what fools experience when they claim love at first sight. A passion too profound to ignore, despite the fact that it’s groundless. Loyalty, fondness, and intimacy that spring into being without reason. Love built on quicksand.





	Love Is All You Keep

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting on my google drive for over a year. I figured it was time to dust it off, polish it up, and post it! Thank you ReyloTrashCompactor and deeppoeticgirl for all your help. I have two amazing betas!

.

.

The file Natasha gave him is surprisingly thin, barely an inch thick. Seventy years worth of torture summarized in so few words, the destruction of a man distilled down to the most basic, clinical facts. Steve reads the translations again and again, poring over each page like he might find answers between the lines of Hydra’s notes. He doesn’t, of course, but he uncovers plenty of guilt.

The handlers always referred to Bucky as “the asset” or “the soldier,” taking his name from him just like they took everything else. Steve can’t decide if he thinks this is the worst or the least of their crimes, but his opinion isn’t the one that matters anyway.

_You might not want to pull on that thread._ That’s what Natasha said when she handed over the Winter Soldier documents. As if Steve has a choice; as if he could ever walk away from Bucky.

For the last six weeks, he and Sam have followed any lead they get, no matter how cold. Uprooting underground Hydra locations, half-hoping to find Bucky exacting some well-earned revenge. Staking out their favorite places before the war, because maybe Brooklyn still means _home_ for both of them. But most of Hydra’s safe houses and bases are deserted, their agents long gone, and if Bucky has bothered to visit any of their old neighborhood haunts, he made sure to cover his tracks.

It’s pure chance that brings them together. The kind of serendipity that Steve stopped believing in the day Bucky fell from the train.

He’s in Paramus, simply because he wanted to get away from his life for a few days but wasn’t irresponsible enough to wander too far. New Jersey is the last place on earth that he’d ever expect to find Bucky Barnes, yet here he is. He sits on a wooden bench at the Van Saun County Park, eating an ice cream cone crowned with two fluffy pink scoops, watching the carousel go round and round.

Steve’s first stupid thought is, _But Bucky hates strawberry ice cream_.

He’s thin, high cheekbones and strong jawline showing too sharply through his skin, dressed in a ragged hoodie and torn jeans that don’t fit right. His hair is dirty, shining with oil under the hot sunlight, and he hasn’t shaved in days.

But Bucky is alive and within reach, so beautiful that his unexpected presence steals Steve’s breath.

.

.

He’s being tailed by Captain America. James felt his gaze at the carousel, intrusive and intimate, and that feeling—of being watched, of being known—has followed him back to the abandoned apartment he’s squatting in.

It’s not Hydra agents. They’d have moved to recapture him by now. And anyone else would have shot on sight. That leaves Steven Grant Rogers: the man on the bridge, the mission he failed.

_Then finish it,_ he’d said, that day on the helicarrier. _‘Cause I’m with you till the end of the line._

Those words, they _mean_ something. James doesn’t know what, exactly, but they reached right down into the pit of him, seized his urge to kill his target and snuffed it out. Now they itch in the back of his brain, restless with a significance he can’t place.

He doesn’t remember much about Steve, not really, and what he can recall feels foreign, like he’s recovering someone else’s memories (and in a way he is). But he’s sure that he never gives up, never stops fighting. Steve nearly let himself be killed, and James knows why, but that’s something he doesn’t want to examine right now—something he’s been trying to ignore for weeks.

He hurries down the dark hall, steps over trash and the forgotten belongings of previous squatters. James thinks of this spot as his safe house, even though it’s neither a house nor particularly safe.

“I know you’re there,” James says.

Steve steps around the corner. Clean-cut, neat, blonde hair kept short, pale face serious but not unkind. He’s out of uniform, dressed in khaki pants and a navy button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His clothes are a bit too small, and on a body less impressive that might be ridiculous. As it is, he just looks handsome, wholesome, and powerful.

_Beautiful_ , James thinks, but he can’t be sure if this thought is truly his own.

Steve says, “Bucky,” in a painfully earnest voice, eyes shining bright with something like hope.

James feels a desire to hit him that has nothing to do with Hydra’s orders. “Don’t call me that,” he says.

“It’s your name,” Steve insists.

James pushes him against the wall and punches the cinder blocks beside his head, hard enough that his metal fist cracks the concrete. “No, it’s not,” he says. “Not anymore.”

Steve winces, like hearing this hurts in a way that blades and bullets couldn’t touch. “Then what name do you want me to use?” he asks.

“Anything else,” James says. “I don’t care.”

Steve frowns. “I think you’ve had enough of people calling you whatever they want. I’m not going to add to that.”

Crowded together like this, James can see all the details of Steve’s face: the barest hint of worry lines creasing his forehead, flecks of green in his blue eyes, the stubborn set of his strong jaw. They’re close enough for him to smell the soap he favors, a clean, plain, masculine scent. Close enough to kiss.

James shakes his head, trying to clear his thoughts, to push out the remnants of a dead man’s residual affections. Then he steps back and says, “Fine. Call me James then.”

It isn’t that James feels any particular attachment to this name, and some instinct tells him that in his former life he might have even disliked it. But _Bucky_ feels too familiar and too unfitting at once, like a childhood coat he’s grown out of. His days of answering to _soldat_ and _soldier_ are done, though, so _James_ will have to do.

Steve follows him (uninvited) into the apartment he’s taken for his own.

James leans against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. “You didn’t call for backup,” he says.

It isn’t a question, and Steve doesn’t treat it like one. “No. I didn’t.”

Silence stretches between them, and Steve keeps staring at him, marveling at James like he’s something precious. As if his very presence is a miracle instead of the worst kind of misfortune.

“Stop,” James says. “Stop looking at me like that.”

Steve turns his face away, speaks more to the wall than to James. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to make you uncomfortable. It’s just that—I missed you, okay?”

He doesn’t know what to do with that. Steve almost died refusing to fight him, and even if James can’t fully comprehend the feelings that would fuel such a choice, he understands the meaning behind it: Steve values James’s life more than his own. He wants him to survive. Not to exploit his skills, not to use him as a weapon, not for any reason at all, except that James matters to him.

That’s too strange to wrap his mind around, but as confusing and unsettling as he finds this, it also awakens a warm feeling in his chest. Steve’s affection may be misplaced, but James hungers for it anyway.

He’s sure that part of this desire is rooted in the deep love that Bucky Barnes held for Steve. He recalls very little of the history that this devotion grew out of, but James doesn’t doubt its strength or sincerity. Bucky’s love was the sort that endures even the worst suffering, and something of it lingers on now, lurking under James’s skin. Muscle memory that makes him want to pull Steve into an embrace—for a friendly hug one moment, then a kiss the next.

James hardly knows Steve, but the man he used to be adored him with single-minded ferocity. Worshiped him with the purity of purpose that zealots reserve for their gods. Bucky would have walked through fire for Steve, would have begged, borrowed, stolen, and killed for him, all without question. It isn’t really surprising that devotion like this could persevere, adapting through death and rebirth.

Some part of him needs Steve, wants to protect and possess him simply because Bucky did, but James doesn’t know how to deal with this. Looking at him now, he’s overwhelmed by the potency of a desire that’s been almost fully divorced from the context that created it.

Maybe this is what fools experience when they claim love at first sight. A passion too profound to ignore, despite the fact that it’s groundless. Loyalty, fondness, and intimacy that spring into being without reason. Love built on quicksand.

.

.

This man is Bucky, yet not. He might have Bucky’s face and Bucky’s voice, but his body language is all wrong. When he isn’t trying to hide in plain sight, he moves with predatory efficiency, aggressive and full of tension, as if he’s always on the verge of attacking. So different from Bucky’s friendly swagger.

He looks at Steve with suspicion, mistrust, and something else that he can’t quite place. It hurts, to be looked at this way by the man he cares for most. Because whatever name he goes by, that’s who James Buchanan Barnes is to Steve: his friend, his comrade, his most precious person.

This bolthole he’s found for himself is barely habitable. There’s no electricity to power the lights, and the windows are covered, so it’s dark even in the middle of the day. He doesn’t have any furniture, just a nest of ratty blankets congregated in one corner. It looks like he’s been keeping himself alive on baked beans and Vienna sausages, if the graveyard of empty tin cans is anything to go by.

Summer weather makes the apartment hot as an oven, stuffy and muggy. Steve can feel his shirt sticking to the middle of his back, growing damp under his arms, and it looks like Bucky (James?) isn’t unaffected either. He pulls his hoodie over his head, and the t-shirt underneath rides up, revealing a stretch of tawny skin. Then he ties his hair back into a short ponytail, his movements methodical and spare, almost robotic, an impression that his bionic arm only enforces.

“Do you remember me?” Steve asks.

Bucky won’t meet his eyes when he says, “A little. Not much.”

Steve takes a deep breath, counts to ten, and tells himself everything is going to be fine. _Not much_ is better than _not at all_ , and besides, it hasn’t even been two months yet. After the hell Hydra put him through, it’s a damn miracle that Bucky knows which way is up, much less that he’s recovering any of his memories. There’s still time for him to heal, to become himself again.

Bucky allowed Steve inside his apartment, but he’s clearly unenthused about his presence. He deflects all questions and disregards any attempts to start a meaningful conversation. By mid-afternoon, Steve is lonely, exhausted, and hungry. He sits in the shadowed darkness beside Bucky as they eat identical lunches of cheap canned peaches.

“Verona Street,” Steve says into the darkness. “That’s where we met. I was getting beat up by Alonzo Petrone after church. You pulled him off me, kicked his ass, and told him to get lost.”

If this means anything to Bucky, if it sparks a memory, he doesn’t say so.

“You stuck with me,” Steve says, because now he’s lost in the past, wandering through Brooklyn with a reckless, interfering boy by his side. “We were inseparable after that; nothing could tear us apart. Until the war, anyway.”

They finish their meal in silence.

.

.

Depending on how you count it, James has been alive for either thirty-odd years, a century, or six weeks. He could be a young man or an elderly man or an infant, and on an average day, he feels like a little of all these things.

His mind is such a mess, full of fragmented memories he’d rather forget and violent lessons he wishes he could unlearn. Now Steve is sitting in his safe house. He holds the answers to James’s questions, extends friendship that could cure his suffocating loneliness. Steve is the solution to his problems, and it would be so easy to take whatever he offers.

Except, it isn’t really James that Steve wants to help. His love is meant for Bucky.

They haven’t spoken in over an hour, not since Steve shared his story about how they met. He sits quietly with his back to the wall, arms resting on his knees, head lowered. A man with an unconquerable will, demoralized and defeated.

James watches Steve, and he’s overcome by yearning. He wants to go to him, touch him, kiss him, and it’s so frustrating he could scream, to carry his former self’s leftover love. James thinks he might be his own person, but it’s hard to believe this when he’s still beholden to Steve, the object of Bucky’s deepest devotion.

He should kill him or kick him out, not stand here mooning like an infatuated teenager.

James goes to his corner and digs out the paperback novel he shoplifted from the Dollar Store three days ago. It’s stupid and poorly-written, with plot holes you could fly a 747 through, but he curls up with a blanket, turns on his flashlight, and reads it anyway. He enjoys the mindless escape of slipping into someone else’s world for awhile, a place where the hero’s biggest problem is catching Stephanie Miller’s attention. He already knows that Stephanie will notice him too late, that the protagonist will fall in love with his best friend, Liza, the plain girl who turns out not to be so plain after all. It’s saccharine, predictable, and unrealistic; James can’t put it down.

When he finishes the book, he sees that Steve hasn’t moved an inch, and all the complications of their situation remain as well, just as immobile.

Maybe Steve senses his gaze, because he looks up for the first time in hours, and James has to fight that overpowering need to close the space between them.

He knows that old desires are feeding this attraction, but his want for Steve isn’t borne from Bucky’s love alone. Much of it comes from something far less simple, a motivation that is purely James’s.

He wants to feel real, to feel like a person. To be cared for and treated gently, wanted and tenderly touched, and he knows that Steve can give this to him. His affection might be misdirected, intended for another man, but James will take it anyway.

.

.

They’ve gone from sitting in silence to standing in silence, and Bucky finally breaks through the thick quiet around sunset.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

“I just want to help you,” Steve says.

He radiates wariness despite his blank expression. “That’s all?”

“That’s all,” Steve promises.

Maybe he answered too slowly, because Bucky frowns and says, “You’re a bad liar.”

He’s right, of course, but Steve didn’t lie, not about this, and he starts to say so. Before he can voice the words, Bucky has him pressed against the wall, his metal hand clamped over Steve’s mouth.

“I’m not stupid,” Bucky hisses. “I know what you really want.”

The look he’s giving Steve now is accusatory and heated, so intimate that he wonders how much Bucky remembers about their life before the war.

He’s close enough that Steve can smell sweat and unwashed clothes and the peach syrup on his breath. His scents are foreign and achingly familiar, and maybe Steve did lie, maybe he does desire more than to help.

Bucky uncovers his mouth, only to wrap his hand around Steve’s throat. He holds him in that steel grasp without squeezing, the threat clear, but perhaps empty.

“I remember some of it,” Bucky says. He leans close, until their lips almost brush when he speaks. “What you used to do with—with _him_.”

_No, with_ you. _I made love with you,_ Steve thinks.

Bucky kisses him—a bit too hard and a little sloppy, like he doesn’t quite know what he’s doing. Even their first kiss wasn’t this clumsy, but Steve’s can’t care. Bucky is alive and aware and kissing him breathless.

Strong hands grab at Steve’s belt, unbuckling it with the same brisk efficiency he applies to every task.

“Wait,” Steve says, and he tries to pull away, but there’s nowhere to go. “We shouldn’t—we shouldn’t do that.”

Bucky’s hands freeze, no longer trying to undress him. But now he’s kissing Steve’s neck, licking and sucking with the kind of ferocity that guarantees there will be marks (not that they’ll last long). “You don’t want me like I am now?” he asks.

The answer to that is _yes_ and _no_ and everything in between. He wants Bucky forever and always, no matter what. But Steve also wants Bucky to know him, and more importantly, to know himself.

“It’s not right,” Steve says. “Not if you don’t really remember who you are.”

Bucky turns him around and crowds him closer to the wall, so that his cheek is pressed to the cool cinder blocks. Kisses the nape of his neck and whispers, “I remember enough. I remember how you like it.”

He runs his hand—flesh, not metal—underneath Steve’s shirt, following the line of his backbone. “You always asked for it rough,” he says. “But you like being kissed real gentle afterwards. Right?”

The fingers tracing his spine feel wonderful, so horribly perfect, and Bucky even sounds more like himself. It would be so easy to give in, but Steve can’t tell if this is real.

“Ask me to stop, and I will,” Bucky promises. “Swear to God.”

It’s one word, one syllable, simple enough, so why can’t Steve bring himself to say it?

Instead, he whispers, “You don’t believe in God.”

Bucky makes a bitter noise that might be a laugh. “Guess that hasn’t changed.”

Steve closes his eyes. Allows himself to enjoy the sensation of Bucky’s mouth on his throat, kissing with too much tongue, all sloppy hunger. Then he stops to say, “C’mon, Stevie. Just tell me you want it.”

He does, he’s never needed anything so much in his life, and hearing that nickname breaks something within him. Bucky must know he’s crying, but at least he can’t see it, not in the darkness with his face buried against Steve’s neck.

“Buck,” he whimpers. “Please stop.”

He immediately lets go and steps backward, giving Steve space. “Sorry. I thought…”

“It’s okay,” Steve says. He wipes his wet cheeks with his shirt sleeve, then turns around, facing Bucky. “It’s fine. Nothing to worry about.”

Except, none of this is okay, none of this is fine, and they’ve both got every reason to worry. He half-expects Bucky to call him out on his lie, but he doesn’t.

.

.

James and Steve eat an uneasy dinner of cold pinto beans and hard candy. They don’t talk about what happened earlier. Apart from a few quiet questions from Steve, which James ignores, they don’t talk at all.

Later, they lie on the floor, wrapped up in musty blankets, silent and still, but sleepless.

“Do you remember the night before you shipped out?” Steve asks.

“No,” James says shortly. “Stop asking me about what I remember.”

“You seemed pretty eager to talk about it a few hours ago,” Steve says, but he sounds more wry than angry.

James rolls onto his side, turning away from Steve. “Well I guess some memories stand out more than others.”

What he’s implying isn’t really true, though. Yeah, he can recall—if only in vague, brief flashes—all the ways in which he fucked Steve in the years before the war. But other things are clearer, more tangible. Teaching Steve how to dance: lessons that were a lost cause, because the poor asshole always has had two left feet (a fact James somehow knows without much evidence to back it up). Making him ride a rollercoaster until he puked. Lying awake at night in their tiny apartment, sharing a bed but not even touching, and Bucky knew that this was the closest he’d ever feel to another person.

Still, these aren’t full memories so much as impressions. Moments in time, suspended outside of their context, that he senses more than remembers. He couldn’t tell you the year he tried to teach Steve to dance, or the name of that rollercoaster, or the street their apartment sat on. And no matter how true these things are, they still don’t feel real to James. Steve belongs to another life, to another man.

James isn’t Bucky Barnes; he just happens to be the unlucky bastard walking around in the sergeant’s skin, the remains of his history buried in the back of James’s broken brain.

Steve touches his shoulder. “Please let me help you,” he says. “You’re right that that isn’t the only thing I want, but it’s the most important.”

“Go to sleep,” James says.

Steve’s hand slides down his arm, cradling the muscle there. “If I do, will you be gone when I wake up?”

_Of course._

“No,” he lies. “What’s the point? You’d just track me down again.”

When he’s certain that Steve is asleep, Bucky slips out of his tangle of blankets, quietly retrieves his favorite knives and guns from their hiding places, and grabs his backpack of supplies, already sitting by the door and ready to go—

Steve rips the bag from his hands and throws it across the room. It’s too dark for James to determine the details of his expression, but he can see enough to know that Steve Rogers is mightily pissed.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

James shrugs. “Nowhere now.”

“Why not? What’s stopping you?” Steve holds out his hands, inviting an attack. “I’m not armed, and you’ve got a small arsenal on you. You could go if you really wanted to.”

“Don’t push your luck,” James says. He draws a dagger from the holster he sleeps in, pokes Steve in the middle of the chest with it. “I’ve killed more people than you’ve ever talked to. Armed, unarmed, it didn’t matter. Men, women... children.”

Steve flinches at that, and James feels both sick with himself and vindicated. Here it is, at last, the sin so vile that Steve couldn’t forgive his precious Bucky for it.

“No witnesses means no witnesses,” James whispers, smiling sharply.

“You couldn’t help what Hydra made you do,” Steve says, and he’s so belligerently sure of himself that it’s almost disgusting. “You didn’t have a choice.”

“No? Then why the fuck are you alive?” James asks. He lowers his knife, slides it back into the holster beneath his shirt. “If I was really so powerless all those years, how am I free right now? All you had to say was, ‘till the end of the line,’ and seventy years of programming went out the goddamn window.”

Steve cups his face, those powerful hands so gentle on him that James can’t help but lean into his touch.

“I’m not sure,” Steve says. “I don’t understand any of what’s happened to you, but I know what kind of person you are. And you’re too good to do the things Hydra used you for.”

He wants to believe that, he really does, and when Steve talks this way, praising the man James is—or at least, the man he used to be—he can almost fall for it.

“Let’s get out of here,” Steve says, smiling softly. “I’ve got a hotel room with all these dandy twenty-first century perks, like running water and electricity. There’s plenty of space for you, extra bed and everything.”

James nuzzles Steve’s hand, kisses his fingers. Maybe he looks needy, but he doesn’t care. He’s desperate enough to beg for something that isn’t his.

“What if I don’t want to sleep in the extra bed?” he asks.

Steve falters, smile slipping, but he doesn’t pull away. “Is that a yes? You’ll come with me?”

James nips at the heel of his palm, presses his lips to the pulse point he feels beating beneath Steve’s skin. “Depends on our sleeping arrangements,” he says.

.

.

Comfort Inns are perfectly adequate hotels, but now that Bucky is joining him, Steve wishes he’d chosen something more luxurious.

It’s past midnight by the time they slip into Steve’s room. The first thing Bucky does is lower the blinds and pull the curtains. Then he combs the space for bugs and hidden cameras.

“It’s clear,” Steve promises. “There’s no way Hydra could know I’m here, much less that you’d be with me.”

“Not worried about Hydra,” Bucky says. Now he’s stripping right in the middle of the room, removing his clothes and weapons in such a matter-of-fact way that Steve doubts it’s meant to be arousing. “I’m a little more concerned about your buddies, the other Avengers.”

Steve counts seven knives and three guns, and Bucky’s not even naked yet. “They don’t know I left town, or where I went, so you don’t have to worry about that either.”

Bucky stops, frozen in the middle of unbuckling his belt. “You didn’t tell anyone you were looking for me?”

Steve tries not to stare at the scarred seam where Bucky’s metal arm meets his shoulder, fusing machine to man. It’s difficult.

“Well, I wasn’t exactly doing that,” Steve says. “I mean, I _have_ been looking for you, almost non-stop since SHIELD fell. But today I wasn’t. Today I only wanted to get away from everything, and finding you at the park was an accident.”

Bucky shakes his head, smiles in a way that isn’t really smiling at all, and continues undressing. “Doesn’t that just figure?”

Two more daggers come out of his boots, joining the pile of weapons on the bedside table. Then he’s standing before Steve in nothing but a faded pair of black boxer briefs. There’s a world of difference in the bold advances he made earlier and the way he’s acting right now, so utterly blasé and clinically unconcerned by his own nakedness. This isn’t about seduction, but Steve wishes it was, because the alternative is too awful to consider: that Bucky is so used to being stripped naked in front of others that he no longer expects any privacy when he undresses.

He turns around when Bucky makes to remove his briefs.

“I’m gonna take a bath,” he says, and a moment later Steve hears the restroom door close, the rushing sound of water filling a tub.

His stomach growls, and he knows that if he’s hungry then Bucky must be starving. Steve looks up the nearest Domino’s on his phone—a gift of the new millennium that Clint introduced him to shortly after the Chitauri invasion. He orders two supreme pizzas, a bottle of soda, and a lava cake (because Bucky has always loved chocolate, and surely this hasn’t changed too).

The food arrives within forty minutes, before Bucky has emerged from the bathroom, which is surprising, but maybe a good thing for the delivery boy.

The delivery boy turns out to be a teenage Latina girl who looks dead on her feet. Steve feels guilty for ordering anything at close to one o’clock in the morning, so he digs an extra twenty out of his wallet and hands over the cash.

She thanks him profusely, pockets her tip, and then squints at him for a moment before saying, “Holy shit! You’re Captain America.”

“You can call me Steve,” he says.

She grins widely. “You’re even bigger in person than you look on screen. I thought it was supposed to be the other way around?”

Steve smiles. “Maybe the uniform is slimming?”

The girl laughs, blushes, and covers her face. “Well it was nice to meet you, Mr. America. I’ll get out of your hair so you can enjoy your pizza.”

He finds Bucky sitting on the bed, wearing nothing but a fluffy white towel around his waist. Long hair frames his face, unkempt and wet. Steve watches a water droplet roll down his chest, and he can’t help but notice how much stronger Bucky looks now than he did during the war. He was always a tall, well-built man—beautiful—but now every inch of him exudes power.

Steve sets the food on the bed and digs through his duffel bag for boxers, sweatpants, and a t-shirt. He hands them to Bucky, keeping his eyes on his face, and says, “Here. You can borrow these.”

Bucky accepts the clothes, if warily. He stands and pulls them on right in front of Steve, not even bothering to turn around.

“You still like pizza, right?” Steve asks, looking away pointedly.

Bucky shrugs. “Food is food,” he says, and that’s so wrong that Steve almost can’t believe it. Probably because he grew up with money, Bucky used to be something of a snob, and he bitched endlessly about Army food. He hated the D-rations so much that he called the high-calorie emergency bars “a crime against chocolate” and traded them for smokes at any given opportunity.

Steve soon suspects that Bucky’s nonchalance was an act, though, because he tears through half his pizza in about five minutes, eating like he hasn’t had a hot meal in the last seventy years. Maybe he hasn’t, but Steve is neither brave enough nor cruel enough to ask.

After dinner, they lie side by side in the soft bed. Sharing, just like Steve promised they would, and he prays that Bucky isn’t expecting more than to sleep. He wants to do the right thing, but he isn’t made of stone.

“I’d skin somebody alive for a bottle of Jack,” Bucky says quietly. “Not that I’d be able to feel it anyway.”

Steve reaches over, takes his hand. Entwines their fingers and says, “Thor has this Asgardian alcohol that he thinks could get me drunk. If it can, it might work for you too.”

Bucky looks at him like he’s crazy. “You really think that getting the brain damaged Hydra assassin wasted on a thunder god’s liquor is a good idea?”

“Well not right now, of course,” Steve says. He gives Bucky’s fingers a gentle squeeze. “Maybe later, though. After you’re better.”

Bucky rips his hand away. “You’re delusional if you think that’s ever gonna happen.”

Steve stops, considering his words carefully. Sometimes he tries too hard to make things okay, a habit that Bucky didn’t appreciate in 1930 or 1944, and Steve doubts he’d care much for it in 2014 either.

“I can’t imagine how you feel right now,” he whispers, because that’s true and it needs to be said. “I wouldn’t have lived through what you’ve survived, much less come out on the other side of it sane. And maybe you’re right, maybe you’ll never be the person you were. But don’t you think it’s a little too early to tell? Six weeks isn’t a lot of time to recover.”

Bucky turns over, giving his back to Steve. “Your opinion doesn’t count,” he says, voice flat. “You want me to be _him_ so badly that it’s compromised your judgement.”

He’s not wrong, and Steve knows it, but if he loses hope then he doesn’t have much left to hang on to.

.

.

From the dull light creeping around the edges of the curtains, James thinks it must be approaching dawn. He rested for at least four hours without nightmares, which is nothing short of a miracle. If you discount the static, dreamless state of cryo, he hasn’t slept so solidly since 1945.

Steve lies on his side with his back to James, one arm underneath his pillow. He sleeps curled up like a child, as if he’s trying to make himself small again. James moves closer, so that he’s pressed against Steve’s back, and nuzzles his shoulder.

“Wake up,” he says.

Steve stirs, makes a weak noise low in his throat, and murmurs, “Bucky?”

James doesn’t correct him. Hearing his old name from Steve’s lips like this, softened by sleep, sends a thrill through him. He isn’t Bucky, not really, but letting Steve pretend otherwise might give them both a sweet break from reality. So he kisses his throat, indulges in gentle nips and little licks that are certain to make both of them hard. James wraps his left arm around Steve’s waist, plays with the hem of his shirt, touches the subtle curves and hollows of his muscular stomach with metal fingers. He wishes they were lying differently, so that he could use his real hand for this, but if the choked sound Seve makes means anything, it must still feel good.

James traces the waistband of his pajama pants, teasing but not pushing. He won’t touch Steve’s cock unless he asks for it, and that’s as much about securing his permission as it is keeping the upper hand.

Steve moves so quickly that James doesn’t quite know what’s happening until he’s on his back, pressed against the bed by Steve’s broad body.

“What, you wanna be on top now? Did the serum change that too?” James asks. He tries to mimic the arrogant, playful tone that he thinks Bucky used to adopt when he flirted.

He must succeed, because Steve’s expression goes from frustrated to longing in less than a second.

James reaches beneath Steve’s shirt and savors the discordant sensations that come from touching another person. He perceives everything with his flesh hand—the heat of Steve’s flushed body, the quick rhythm of his racing heart, the softness of his skin—but his artificial hand is less discerning. Like he’s reaching through a veil, one that withholds sensitivity to temperature and disallows pleasure or pain. He can feel with it, but only in the most unsatisfying, meaningless way.

“Why are you doing this?” Steve asks. He sounds broken, but he holds himself steady, refusing to lean into James’s touch.

His willpower would be admirable if it wasn’t so fucking annoying.

“I want to remember, and I think this could help,” he says.

It’s the worst sort of lie, and Steve’s too smart to buy it, but James is banking on desperation to override his discipline. Still, instinct tells him that Steve won’t break for the sake of his own pleasure. Offering up Bucky’s, though, that’ll do the trick.

“Please,” James whispers, and now he’s pulling at Steve’s shirt, licking his Adam’s apple, rocking against him. “Please touch me.”

Steve kisses him, hard and deep. James welcomes it, kisses back just as brutally, giving as good as he gets. Then Steve breaks away and says, “Tell me what you want, and I’ll do it.”

Everything, he wants everything—all that they used to do, and all that they missed or never knew of—but James knows where he wants to start. “Suck me,” he says.

Steve skips any sort of romantic foreplay, doesn’t bother to leave a trail of kisses down his chest or to massage his thighs, and James can’t remember their old trysts well enough to know if he was always this straightforward. He pulls James’s pants down his hips, then bends to take him right into his mouth.

He cries out and arches up, because he didn’t realize that anything could feel this good. James buries his hands in Steve’s hair, guides him to take his cock deeper. His sweet mouth is so warm and wet, almost too much. Steve sucks him with skill and enthusiasm, and he obviously remembers exactly what gives James the most pleasure, where and how to use his mouth to make a complete mess of him. It’s strange, being so perfectly known by someone when he no longer knows himself, but James is too close to his climax to give it real thought. This has barely lasted two minutes, and he’s already on the verge of coming. Like he’s sixteen all over again, feeling everything for the first time, too inexperienced to maintain any self-control.

He tugs Steve away. No matter how new this seems, he’s actually fucked more people than he could recall even if his memory _wasn’t_ a shattered piece of shit. And James knows enough about sex to realize he should be embarrassed by this.

Steve’s pouty lips part from him with a lewd sound, and just that sight—pink mouth slick, cheeks flushed, eyes watery from gagging—almost finishes him anyway. He takes an unsteady breath and forces himself to count backwards from a hundred. Around sixty he stops feeling like the barest touch will set him off, and he drags Steve on top of him again. Kisses him roughly, all violent hunger and sloppy need, too frayed to care how clumsy he’s being. He tastes himself, earthy on Steve’s tongue, an obscene flavor he might find offensive under other circumstances.

Steve kisses back, kisses like he’ll never get enough of him. Then he yanks his shirt up and gives his stomach and chest the attention he denied earlier. Presses his lips to James’s belly, sucks his nipples, and nuzzles the seam that joins his cybernetic arm to his body. Steve looks at him, gaze flickering between his shoulder and his face, and he doesn’t even have to ask the question. James nods, then watches as Steve lays barely-there kisses to the place where Hydra machinery bleeds into scarred skin. Soft, sweet, almost too gentle to feel.

He quivers and whines, overcome by so much feeling that he nearly chokes on it. Disbelief that someone could ever handle him this tenderly. Gratitude, because Steve is looking at the most hated part of his body like it’s beautiful instead of grotesque, lavishing the disfigured flesh and unforgiving metal with love. Desire to touch and be touched, to give and take, to recover everything he’s lost and offer it to Steve: a reward for making him feel human again.

James moans, and Steve grows bolder, licks along the line of the old injury. Tongue tracing the twisted scar tissue, the cold titanium, telling him without words that his patchwork body is worth wanting.

He grabs at Steve, pulls him close, bucks up against his belly. All it takes are a few thrusts, a little bit of friction, his cock rubbing along that hard stomach while Steve kisses his shoulder, and he’s there, coming with a strangled.

It takes a long moment to recover enough to think. Then James flips them over, putting Steve on his back, and moves to pull down his pants—

“No,” Steve says, even though he’s hard and his whole body is quaking. “It’s all right. You haven’t got to—you don’t have to do that, okay?”

He kisses Steve’s belly, grips his thigh, and says, “I want to, though.”

“Yeah?” Steve sounds wary but hopeful. He cards his fingers through James’s hair, caresses his cheek, cups the nape of his neck.

He palms Steve’s stiff cock through his cotton pants and feels a rush of satisfaction when he moans. “Please? Let me suck you. Let me make you come. Pay you back for being so good to me.”

This must not be the right thing to say, because Steve shakes his head, pushes James off of him, if gently, and turns on his side, away from him.

“Steve?” James asks. He did something wrong, but he doesn’t know what.

“We can talk about it later,” Steve says. His voice sounds strained, sad and unfulfilled.

James lies awake, listening to Steve. How he bites down his sobs, trying to hide his crying, until he wears himself out and his breathing slows, slipping into the even cadence of sleep.

He got what he wanted. So why does he feel so empty?

.

.

Steve sleeps fitfully for two hours, plagued by nightmares: Bucky falling from the train, reaching for him as he plummets to the bottom of the ravine; being stabbed, shot, and beaten by the Winter Soldier, looking up into his best friend’s face and finding a stranger’s eyes; waking on the bank of the Potomac, half-dead and hurting all over, knowing that he’d let Bucky slip through his fingers again.

His nightmares are always like this. He relives his worst failures and his deepest grief, things that are just as real when he wakes as they felt while he dreamed.

Beside him, Bucky sleeps on. Sprawled out on his stomach, taking up more than half the bed, mouth slightly open. He looks peaceful like this, his beautiful face free of tension, powerful body relaxed. So much has changed, but Bucky sleeps exactly like he did in 1935, and there’s something reassuring about that.

Steve gives up on getting any rest. He climbs out of bed, goes to the bathroom, and strips out of his clothes. His t-shirt is stained and stiff with Bucky’s dried come, and he tries not to look at it as he undresses. Steve takes the hottest shower he can tolerate, soaps up his body, and scrubs until his skin turns red and angry. Then he stands under the scalding spray, letting the water run over him, washing away all evidence of this morning’s mistakes.

What was he thinking? Bucky’s been free from Hydra for less than two months. He’s barely beginning to recover from an unimaginable ordeal that left him hurt, confused, and vulnerable. He needs a friend, someone who can be patient and careful—who can keep his hands off of him.

He focuses on his guilt, because it’s easier to process than the anger he’s feeling. Bucky used and manipulated him, lied through his teeth to get what he wanted. He exploited Steve’s desire to comfort so that he’d pleasure him. Took his need to help and turned it into something base and ugly.

Maybe this would be easier to forgive if Steve hadn’t loved every goddamn moment of it so much.

He can’t keep thinking about what happened—the way Bucky begged to be sucked, his weak little whimpers, how easy it was to make him come—or he’s going to get hard. Steve knows that if he jerks off to the memory of what they did together he’ll only hate himself more.

When he leaves the bathroom, one towel wrapped around his waist while he uses another to dry his hair, Steve realizes that he’s alone.

The room is empty. Bucky’s clothes and weapons are missing, and the man himself is nowhere to be seen.

“Oh God,” he says, even though there’s no one to hear. Steve rushes to dress, because maybe if he hurries, if good luck sides with him for once, he can catch Bucky before he runs too far—

The door opens, and there’s Bucky, dressed in his unseasonably covering clothes. “Hey,” he says, casually, like he didn’t just give Steve a heart attack.

“You’re here,” Steve says stupidly. He’s standing half-naked in the middle of this room, shirtless and shaking, with one leg in his pants and mismatched socks on his feet.

Bucky’s gaze lingers on the breadth of Steve’s shoulders, his bare chest and belly, assessing and mildly lascivious. “I found us some food,” he says, and he sets a brown paper bag on the bedside table.

“I thought you were gone.” Steve braces himself against the wall and breathes deeply, willing his heartbeat to slow, his adrenaline-fueled trembling to stop. “Why didn’t you leave a note?”

“Didn’t think about it.” Bucky digs through the paper sack, withdraws a chocolate covered donut, and eats half of it in one bite. He chews, swallows, then says, “Besides, I didn’t think you’d be out of the shower that fast. Figured your self-flagellation would take longer.”

He blushes, because Bucky’s assumption hits embarrassingly close to home. Steve finishes dressing and eats his own breakfast in silence. He’s on his third Boston cream before he thinks to ask how Bucky paid for two dozen donuts.

Bucky looks at him like he’s painfully precious and perhaps a bit slow. “What makes you think I paid for them?”

“Buck,” Steve says, so exhausted and worried that he doesn’t even realize his mistake.

“My name is James,” he says, voice quiet but hard.

_You didn’t care what I called you this morning_ , Steve thinks, but that’s too spiteful to say.

Bucky stares at Steve with such resentment that he ducks his head, abashed. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll try to remember better.”

Bucky’s expression flattens again, and he goes back to eating bismarks.

Steve hates to say anything else after that, but he can’t just let Bucky keep stealing. “Look, if you need money—”

“I don’t want your charity, Steve.” He licks his fingers, wipes his hands on his jeans, and says, “I can take care of myself just fine.”

Steve laughs under his breath. “Boy do I know that. You’ve always been independent, and getting pumped full of super-soldier serum didn’t exactly hurt your self-sufficiency. But I don’t like to see you stealing when you don’t have to.”

Bucky’s mouth twists into a smirk. “He used to steal all the time. Bucky, I mean. I’m not sure why he did it, but I remember enough to know it happened a lot,” he says. “He’d pick-pocket strangers on the street. Charm rich old ladies, then lift their purses when they weren’t looking.”

This isn’t anything Steve didn’t already know, even if he’d always been too ashamed to talk to Bucky about it. “You did it for me,” Steve says softly. “Usually to pay for medicine when I was sick. And sometimes you’d come home with gifts out of the blue. Like fancy art supplies, or new boots when I wore out my old ones. Nice stuff, things I knew you couldn’t afford.”

“So he was a thief,” Bucky says, unconcerned. He pauses, frowns, then asks, “What else?”

Hope flares in Steve’s chest, because Bucky is actually asking about his past, but he tries not to look too excited. “What do you want to know?”

Bucky shrugs, kicks off his shoes, and sits on the edge of the bed. “Whatever’s important, I guess.”

It’s all important to Steve, each tiny detail valuable in its own way. Everything from Bucky’s favorite color (blue) to the way he liked to be kissed (sweetly when he was happy, roughly when he wasn’t).

Steve sits beside Bucky, careful to keep a fair amount of space between them, and says, “You had three little sisters. Their names were Rebecca, Deborah, and Abigail. You and Rebecca fought like cats and dogs, and sometimes it got ugly, but Deb and Abbie worshipped the ground you walked on…”

He gives Bucky the simpler details of his family life. If he asks directly about the other stuff—the dark parts of his household, the side of the story that isn’t so pretty—Steve will be honest, of course. But if Bucky doesn’t remember George Barnes’s brutal ways, then maybe that’s for the best.

“Oh, and you’re Jewish!” Steve says. “Well, sort of. Your dad didn’t let you practice, and you never were much for God anyway. But you were real close to your ma, and I think you liked being Jewish since she was. Sorry, I wish I could explain better, but you didn’t talk about it much.”

“It’s okay,” Bucky says, and he sounds almost nervous.

He lies down and pulls Steve with him, so that they’re face-to-face on the bed. Bucky takes his hand, twines their fingers together, and whispers, “Tell me more.”

.

.

Steve talks for hours, and James listens. He shares some stories from the war, trying to remind James of the other Howling Commandos, of all the things they accomplished together. The enemies they defeated and people they saved. Maybe to assure him that all of his suffering wasn’t for nothing.

But mostly, Steve recounts adventures from their youth in Brooklyn. Pranking Rebecca and getting into brawls with neighborhood bullies. Riding the Cyclone at Coney Island until Steve tossed his cookies (and James is thankful for this piece of information, because he’s been trying to remember the name of that fucking rollercoaster for a month). Sobering up at the greasy spoon on Smith Street, the one that was open 24/7; Steve says a real nice girl named Shirley worked there in 1940, and that she and Bucky went steady for a few months.

“There were a lot of women, weren’t there?” James asks.

“Well, for you,” Steve says, but his smile is self-deprecating, not accusatory. “You were always popular with the ladies. Girls—well, they just weren’t that interested in me. Not before the serum anyway. Except for Peggy, I think, but she was too professional to show it when we first met.”

When he says Peggy’s name with so much wistful yearning laced into his voice, James squeezes Steve’s hand more tightly. A possessive reflex, and he understands that Bucky Barnes was sick with jealousy of Peggy Carter. The kind of envy that can drive you to do stupid, selfish, reckless things.

A memory surfaces, sharp and sudden: the sting of Peggy’s slap; the taste of copper on his tongue, rich and metallic; wiping lipstick and blood from his mouth, both startlingly red under the streetlights.

“I kissed her once,” James says, and he almost can’t breathe, so overwhelmed by the vividness of a moment long past that it feels more like _his_ than anything else he’s remembered. “Peggy. I don’t know where we were exactly. Outside of a pub? I kissed her, and she backhanded me.”

Steve’s whole body stiffens, and when he speaks, his voice is tight with some barely contained emotion. “Why would you do that?”

Steve remains perfectly still, frozen in place, waiting for an answer, but James can’t seem to stop shaking. “Because I was angry,” he says. “I was so goddamn angry, Steve. That you wanted her more than me, that you were gonna choose her and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it to change your mind.”

He makes himself say the rest, say the worst of it. “So I decided to ruin what you had, to get between the two of you the only way I knew how—or try to anyway. I should have known better, though. Should have known that Peggy was too good to fall for that.”

Steve’s jaw clenches, but he doesn’t say anything. Like he’s furious and he doesn’t know what to do with fury found seventy years too late.

“I’m sorry,” James says softly, and his stomach wrings itself into knots, twisted by some foul feeling he can’t name. Whatever you call the cross between shame and guilt. “I think I was a bad person, even before…”

Before the electric shocks, the ice, the torture. Before he was turned into a murderer and traitor, he was never anything like a decent human being. Maybe that’s why Hydra could shape him into whatever they wanted, could fill him up with orders and lies; because he was empty to begin with.

“Shut up with that,” Steve says, and now he reaches for James, cradles his cheek. “Listen to me. You are a _good_ man, the best I’ve ever known. So you didn’t always do the right thing. So what? Nobody does. That doesn’t make you a bad person.”

James grasps Steve’s wrist, slides his thumb along his pulse point, and feels the rhythm of blood rushing under his skin. Slow, steady beats at first, but when James moves nearer, closing the small space between them, his pulse quickens.

Steve’s belief in him might be as misguided as his love, but James needs it too much to care.

Before he can lean in for a kiss, Steve places a firm hand against his chest and says, “Don’t. Please.”

He wants to find some comfort in Steve’s arms again, and being denied when he knows Steve wants it too is frustrating. But he also feels some relief, because if fucking the broken man in Bucky’s body is too wrong for him to indulge in, then maybe this means that Steve is beginning to see James for himself.

.

.

He hasn’t even been out of Brooklyn for forty-eight hours when Natasha calls. Steve lets his phone ring for half a minute, even though he has no choice but to answer. Bucky watches him, expression wary, body wound tight. He leans against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, head bowed so that his long hair falls into his face.

Steve sighs, then answers the phone. Before he can say hello, Natasha asks, “Where have you been?”

“Paramus,” he says, because she’ll know that soon enough if she doesn’t already. No doubt she’s tracing this call.

“New Jersey?” Natasha asks. “Really?”

Steve smiles, because she could be Bucky in 1943, disbelieving and disdainful. “Yes, really.”

“Why?” she asks, voice so even and cool. “If you’re following a lead on the Winter Soldier, why didn’t you take Sam with you?”

“It’s not that,” Steve says. He envies Natasha’s ability to stay perpetually calm and collected, because he’s barely a minute into this conversation and he already sounds like a wreck, like a liar. “I just—I had to get away for awhile.”

He looks at the floor, the ceiling, the closed curtains shielding the window. Anywhere but at Bucky.

There’s a long silence on the other end of the line, and Steve knows that Natasha isn’t using it to find her next words. She thinks too quickly for that. No, this is a calculated quiet, meant to set him on edge, to make him nervous.

He’s ready to jump out of his skin by the time Natasha finally says, “Steve. We’re in the middle of hunting down what’s left of Hydra. This isn’t a good time for a vacation.”

She’s pushing his buttons, trying to wind him up, and it’s working.

“You think I don’t know that?” Steve asks, too sharply, because taking down Hydra is personal to him in a way that none of the other Avengers can understand. It hurts that she’d accuse him of shirking his responsibilities—even if it’s only part of a strategy to get him to say too much.

“Of course you know,” Natasha says, soothing, conciliatory. “Which means you’ve either gone off the deep end or you’re lying to me about Barnes.”

Steve’s heart pounds and his breathing grows short. It almost feels like an asthma attack, like the air has been stolen from his burning lungs.

“I can’t talk about this,” he says. “I can’t.”

Natasha makes a sympathetic humming noise, but she keeps questioning him anyway. “Is this another wild goose chase, or did you find him?”

Steve turns away from Bucky and says, “Don’t ask me that. Because if you do, I have to answer. And if I answer, you have to tell the others. So don’t ask.” Then, softer, he says, “Please, Nat.”

She sighs—a remarkably real response in the middle of this conversation she’s been steering since he answered the phone. “So you found him.”

Steve takes a few deep breaths, but they barely calm him, because he doesn’t know what to do. Natasha wouldn’t set the authorities on Bucky, he knows that, but if she tells the rest of their team, then half the Avengers might descend on this hotel by nightfall. Bucky’s too fragile for that, too wounded and suspicious, and someone will get hurt.

The phone is ripped out of his hand before Steve even realizes that Bucky is there. He’d crept across the room like a ghost, invisible and silent.

“You’re giving him a fucking nervous breakdown,” Bucky hisses. “Back the hell off.”

Natasha’s voice sounds muffled now that the phone is pressed against Bucky’s ear, but Steve still hears her ask sweetly, “Or what, _soldat_? You’ll shoot me again?”

Bucky flinches when she calls him _soldier_ , but his voice remains firm when he says, “Third time’s a charm, darling.”

Steve shakes his head, grabs for Bucky wrist, and whispers, “James, please give the phone back to me.”

Bucky hands it over, if reluctantly. Steve asks Natasha, “What are you going to tell the others?”

“Nothing,” she says, and he can practically hear her frowning. “Don’t make me regret that choice.”

“I won’t,” Steve swears. He feels so relieved that he’s sagging against the wall, too tired to even hold himself up straight. “You can tell Sam, though. He deserves to know, after all the work he put in, trying to help me find Bucky.”

“Good call, but you’ve maybe got a week before somebody else notices you’re missing. Less, if Tony gets bored and decides to bother you. So you need to decide what it is you want to do next,” Natasha says.

Steve looks at Bucky, who is watching him carefully, blank-faced and guarded. “I know. Goodbye.”

She hangs up without another word, and Steve stuffs his phone into his pocket.

He’s been living in an impossible dream for the last two days—Bucky alive and returned to him, if not entirely himself—but Natasha’s call interrupted the strange bubble they’ve made for themselves. A hostile world exists outside of this hotel room, and ignoring that won’t make it go away.

Steve steels himself for a difficult discussion about bringing Bucky back to New York. Revealing his presence to the other Avengers, getting ahead of things before either friends or foes catch up to them. “We should talk about—”

“No,” Bucky says shortly. “We should pack.”

Steve freezes, unsurprised, yet somehow still thrown. “Pack? We can’t just run away.”

Bucky ignores him. He starts gathering Steve’s things and throwing them haphazardly into his duffel bag. “Why not?”

Steve throws up his hands. “Because! The whole damn world is looking for you, and if I tag along, they’ll be looking even harder. Besides, running just makes you look guilty—”

“I am guilty,” Bucky says, and he somehow manages to sound both bitter and unconcerned.

He grabs the front of Bucky’s dirty hoodie and pulls him close. “That’s not right and you know it.”

Bucky reaches into Steve’s pocket, and for a moment all he registers is that metal hand is in his pants. He breathes in sharply and closes his eyes, but then Bucky withdraws his hand, and he’s holding Steve’s phone. With a lazy flex of his steel fingers, the glass screen cracks and the frame crumples, turning the finest piece of Stark mobile tech into trash.

Bucky tosses the broken phone to the floor, cups Steve’s face, and says, “I’m not turning myself over to anybody. You can come with me, or you can let me go. What’s it gonna be?”

There’s a third option, of course. Steve could try to stop Bucky, could bring him in against his will. But he won’t do that, and they both know it.

He can feel the contrasting sensations of Bucky’s mismatched hands cradling his cheeks: one warm, familiar, and indisputably alive; the other cold, mechanical, and foreign—yet still a part of Bucky, and beloved for that reason alone.

“It’s me or them,” he says.

This should be a difficult decision, but it isn’t. He’d fight the whole damn world if it meant he could keep Bucky safe and by his side.

“C’mon, Stevie. Pick me,” he whispers.

“Always,” Steve says. He turns his face into Bucky’s palm and presses a soft kiss to the cold metal. “I’ll always choose you.”

.

.

James still can’t remember where their vow came from, and he doesn’t understand how one promise could break through Hydra’s programming. But he thinks, maybe, that it doesn’t matter anymore. They’re on the road, driving halfway across America to see the Grand Canyon, Steve’s right hand held loosely in James’s left, and he realizes as they leave New Jersey that he doesn’t need to remember _I’m with you till the end of the line_. Not anymore, because now he _knows_ what it means.

They can figure out the rest along the way.

.

.


End file.
